Hilzoy over at Obsidian Wings is angry about the fact that athletes are going to have to compete in the horrible Chinese smog, where they can’t be at their best (heck, where they stand a good chance of not finishing their events). This is understandable, because people like watching the Olympics; they’re fun and at their best moments display the potential for nobility inherent within the human spirit, which no doubt is what Pierre de Coubertin intended.

But make no mistake: if we have to watch athletes wheezing their way through events, turning the Olympics into a joke? Well, it’s really no less than we deserve. We’re all of us wholly complicit in China’s environmental rape. Nobody forced us to go buy cheap Chinese-made goods, but we did. (And seriously – try avoiding them. IKEA’s goods are all almost Chinese-made now, for heaven’s sake. You go to IKEA, you expect stuff to be Swedish, but no.) And we can pretend all we like that giving China the Olympics was done in the hope that their society would open up, but all that’s happened instead is the party leadership treating the Olympics as a propaganda opportunity and cracking down even more harshly on dissidents. How we’re supposed to be surprised by that happening is beyond me.

So maybe these Olympics should really, really suck. Maybe then we’ll learn something about the limits of the healing power of sport, or at the very least about the wholly scummy, sycophantic nature of the International Olympic Committee. Maybe then.

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Even Birkenstocks, which really embodied the idea that precise German hand-crafted engineering would always be worth every penny, are now made in China. How did they buy the Germans? The world is over, man.

To quote Warren Ellis, “This is the future. This is what we built. This is what we wanted. It must have been. Because we all had the fucking choice, didn’t we? It is only our money that allows commercial culture to flower. If we didn’t want to live like this, we could have changed it at any time, by not fucking paying for it.”

“The ethics commission has investigated the issue for one week, and will make recommendation to the executive board which will make the decision”.

Asked if IOC is expected to hand out tough punishment if the allegation is proven true, Davies said that “let’s wait and see, but the most important thing to notice is that the IOC has moved quickly on the issue,” she said.

Y’see. the spent a whole week on it. And what’s important isn’t whether anyone found guilty is punished. What’s important is that they be seen to be doing something.

Hate to be the one to point this out, but the Olypmic Games are not about human rights. They aren’t about opening trade. They aren’t about political freedom. They’re about people from all over the world sharing a common love of sport. People have a bad tendency to try to make political hay for their pet issues out of anything.

Well, to be fair IKEA was started specifically with having things made not in sweden to be cheap. That was the point of it. It was all polish stuff from the start.

I wonder if it is different depending on the country where things are made, because we still have a LOT of stuff from poland and the former eastern block over here in sweden… but I guess that it might depend on the market.

@Mongo:
Except that China’s environmental problems effect nations and environments globally. If their environmental problems lead to say, lead contamination of food exported to the US and around the world– I think that makes it the US’ problem too.

@Burrowowl:
Yes, just sports. And maybe a tiny bit of product placement…. aaand some choice political posturing and speech-making by national leaders here and there…. But you’re right, and the Chinese government agrees with you. I mean to make sure the it’s just about the sports, the government is responsibly suppressing any dissent as MGK noted in the link above. Just sports, yes oh yes.

That’s true but how does smog in Beijing affect the US? Every developing nation has gone through the same pollution problems as China. It’s not very fair to expect the Chinese to avoid every problem countries like the US went through during their development.

And how would not buying products from China improve its human rights? China used to be isolated from the world and its human rights were even worse than they were now. Now China does have to worry about world opinion and millions of Chinese travel abroad and are exposed to other societies and ideas. Engaging China might not work but isolating China didn’t work either, so engagement is worth a shot.